This book studies the birth of the State of Israel and analyzes the elaborately articulated and variegated ideological principles of the Zionist movement that led to that birth. It examines conflicting pre-state ideals and the social structure that emerged in Palestine's Jewish community during the Mandate period.

In particular, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society reflects upon Israel's existence as both a state and a social structure - a place conceived before its birth as a means of solving a particular social malady: the modern Jewish Problem.

Jehuda Reinharz and the late Ben Halpern carefully trace the development of the Zionist idea from its earliest expressions up to the eve of World War II, setting their study against a broad background of political and social development throughout Europe and the Middle East.